Rough Wine
XXVIII
The house had gone entirely quiet outside her door when, at last, it opened again. Apparently, she had not locked it. Or he had another key. Or it might not have been closed at all.
Elizabeth was reclining on the bed, the wineskin now more than half depleted and her mood less than half improved. Darcy turned to hang his coat and hat on a hook by the door and stopped when he saw her.
“You are still awake.”
She toasted him with the wineskin. “Are you sorry?”
He finished hanging his hat. “Perhaps you should tell me. Am I quite safe?”
Elizabeth rose from the bed and offered him the wineskin. “You will not be if you drink this. I daresay your gilded tongue has never tasted anything so vile in all your silver-spooned existence.”
He grimaced and took the skin. “Still insulting me, I see. At least you did not lace the insult with profanities.”
“The wine is its own profanity.”
He lifted the skin to his lips. At his first swallow, he coughed. At his second, his face contorted into a spasm of sweat and agony. He did not take a third.
“Good Lord,” he wheezed as he handed the skin back. “That swill has turned to pure vinegar.”
“Mr Darcy, the common man lives on this ‘swill.’ But I suppose you would know nothing of that, would you?”
“I may be forced to,” he retorted, with that face that said he thought himself clever. “If that clerk never finds evidence of my bond.”
“Ah! There it is. I wondered how long it would be before we were back to talking of your fortune.”
She tipped the wineskin and splashed more wine into her mouth before he could answer. It was rough, hot, and unpardonably welcome.
Darcy’s head came up. “Steady on. How much have you had?”
She held the skin by its spout so he could see for himself how loose it was. “You may command carts, clerks, and border towns if it amuses you. You shall not command my drink.”
“God forbid I should aspire so high.” He took the skin back from her, drained a short measure into his mouth, and swallowed with a grim sort of determination. “There. Proof that I stand in no judgment over you, Mrs Darcy.”
“I never said you did. From the smell of your breath, you already had some.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off his boots. “It was far more than ‘some.’ What they were serving downstairs came out of a barrel and was slightly less rancid.”
Elizabeth took another long pull at the wineskin. “Ah, so you complain of coins flowing out of your purse like water through a sieve, but how much have you spent on drink for the pair of us tonight?”
He got his last boot off and stood up. “Apparently, not enough. Very well, madam. It is obvious you have something to say, and until you have said it, you will be flinging barbs at me the rest of the night. What is it?”
She stared back at him, but the words would not come. She could not even be sure what the words had been, only that she wished to be heard, must be heard, and now that she had a captive listener, nothing would dislodge from her mouth.
So, she drank instead.
Darcy set his hands on his waist and shook his head. “When you think of whatever crime you meant to lay at my feet, try not to wake me.” He crossed to the chair in the corner and began to untie his cravat.
“We should leave for England tomorrow,” she said. It came out slurred.
He turned round, his fingers still tugging at the cloth at his throat.
“There is nothing I would like better, but I am ruined if I do. You said yourself that there seems a good chance the ledger entry is here. It only wants finding, and once found, I can have it presented to the treasury commissioner… wherever he is.”
“Ah, there it is! We will be searching for this man for weeks. Months, perhaps, marauding about this God-forsaken country like two witless wraiths who have not the good sense to know they are already dead.”
His face darkened. “What would you have me do? The note on Pemberley comes due by Michaelmas!”
“Go home!” she cried back. “Let me go home and do what I can for my uncle, while you marry your heiress and set her dowry against your debt!”
His shoulders seemed to grow wider, his stance stiffer. “Not even the daughter of an earl’s dowry could touch the half of it. I would need another loan, or an extension of my current one, and that is —”
“That is why you chose the daughter of Lord Marchwood.”
He blinked. “What can you know of any of that?”
She swallowed more wine. “Do you think me so wholly ignorant of the ton? Of finance? I have helped my uncle for two years. I know the names that keep coming up where matters of trade are concerned, where Spain is concerned, even. I know at least four trading houses that are beholden to him. I know he has interests in wool, and wine, and tobacco. And I know that if a man wished to be on favourable terms with a bank, it would help to be on favourable terms with Lord Marchwood.”
He shook his head. “You think you understand —”
“Oh, I know I do. Your father was a fool, so now, you must be prudent. Sell yourself, and convince some poor female who only sees your impressive height and striking features to sell herself as well, and you will have secured your fortune for generations. You have arranged it all rather neatly, have you not?”
He stalked closer. “I came to Spain to put the affair aright without necessitating any of that! I could have married any number of heiresses before now, and I did not. Good God, madam, how can you be so callous about the matter?”
She tipped the wineskin again, and this time, she tasted sediment.
She was coming to the end of it. She coughed slightly.
“Meanwhile, you leave a perfectly good ‘alternative scheme’ waiting for you in London with only the vague promise of your return. Enough to keep her from accepting other suitors, but not enough to assure her that you will put a ring on her finger. You, sir, are the one who is callous.”
He moved a little closer and put one hand on the bedpost. “How dare you?”
“How dare I speak the truth? I see now where Mr Bingley took his instruction. Was that what my sister was to him? A happy expedient against failure elsewhere? Or was he truly only amusing himself?”
Darcy’s face flashed in horror and fury. “He had every reason to believe she felt nothing for him!”
“Because you told him that!” she shot back. “Admit it. You were the one who suddenly left Meryton with no warning whatsoever and took the heart out of your friend, so that he left only a week later without ever hosting the ball he had promised to the neighbourhood. My sister cried for a month!”
His hand left the bedpost as if he meant to turn it into a raised fist against Heaven, then fell to the post again. “Madam… there were… reasons which I do not care to disclose…”
“The reason was your pride.”
He looked as if she had struck him full across the face. “You think pride was all of it?”
“What else could it be for a man who must always stand above everyone in the room, even when he has come near enough to breathe the same air?”
“That is not how I remember my time in Meryton.”
“Hah! Men are often delicate in the recollection of their own humiliations.”
“Then we are better matched than either of us deserves!”
“Do not talk to me of matching. I know perfectly well what you thought of me! Too little family, too much tongue, too quick to laugh, too ready to think myself your equal.”
He shook his head. “I thought none of those things. God help me, I wish I had.”
The answer came so quickly that it split her anger open. “What, then? Since confession appears to agree with you, go on!”
His hand tightened on the post. “I thought you saw too much. I thought you laughed where I was weakest. I thought if you once knew how completely you could disorder me, you would make sport of it.”
She snorted. “Sport? You were rude to me! You disliked me.”
“Is that what you thought?” His voice had acquired a tremor.
“You certainly disliked being at a disadvantage. Especially with me.”
He came round the corner of the bed then, his face darkening as he approached. “I was vain enough to resent it.” He was close enough now that she could see the darkening of his pupils, the slight flutter of his breathing.
“It improves the history very little.” She drank, draining the dregs.
The wine ran rough over her tongue. Darcy watched her mouth when she lowered the skin as if she had just taken the last sips of water from a man dying of thirst. She saw the flare in his eyes and hated the answering heat in her skin.
She tossed the empty wineskin at his feet.
“This has nothing to do with the past,” he said. “You are angry because we have to go through Burgos. Because you have been told ‘no’ to the impulsive, foolish things you want to do.”
“I am angry because I am exhausted, and because I have not had a proper meal in weeks, and because I am stuck with the single most frustrating, disagreeable, tyrannical —”
“Tyrannical! Because I will not let you kill yourself or be stolen and abused by barbarous deserters and desperados, I am tyrannical! Have I not done everything in my power to protect you, to purchase you whatever comforts I can, to make no demands of you that were not explicitly agreed upon before this sham of a marriage ever happened?”
She crossed her arms. “Because you have become necessary. Because I meant to endure your company for perhaps a fortnight, and it has been over a month with no end in sight, and every day gives you some new claim upon my life. Because you keep saying ‘we,’ as if the word itself could make the lie respectable, and because I am starting to believe it.”
He faltered. “You… You say it, too.”
She balled her fists and stamped her foot, hoping he would notice that rather than the fact that her eyes were starting to sting and swell again.
“You contradict me, arrange me, expect me to be rational when what I truly want is to scream, and you call it being ‘prudent.’ If I say ‘we,’ it is because every time I try to make a plan without you, I find you are already in it!”
She saw his throat move when he swallowed.
She saw the loosened line of his collar where the day had worn through.
She saw his hand clenching, strong, and calloused, and far too familiar.
Weeks of travel had taught her who he was in all his forms. She could have hated him more easily if she had not known how he looked tired, or angry, or silent on the point of saying something that pained him.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Stayed there. Lifted again.
He said her name under his breath, as if he were making one last attempt at reason.
She ought to have answered with a jest. She ought to have turned away and refused to speak to him for the rest of the night. Instead, she said, “Do not.”
His eyes did not leave hers, and his voice had dropped to a tone she had never heard. “You said that earlier, and I kept away. I have tried to keep clear of you all evening, because I knew if I did not, I would do or say something I could not take back.”
“All evening? How flattering. You find yourself unable to snub me or argue with me, so you threaten to seduce me instead?”
“If I meant to seduce you, I should have chosen a method less dependent on your desire to insult me.”
“You flatter yourself that I —”
She broke off because, while saying it, she had put one finger straight against the middle of his chest to make the point land. He looked down at it, then back at her, and closed his hand gently round her wrist.
Her breath stopped short. “Take your hand away.”
He drew her a little nearer by the wrist he held. “You are the one who laid hands first.”
She ought to have pulled free. Instead, she let him keep her there, close enough to smell the wine on his breath and the salt on his skin. “You are insufferable.”
“So I am told.”
“And vain. The only person who matters to you is you.”
His eyes blackened. “That is a lie, and you know it. You make every kindness out as some self-serving act, and resent whenever someone tries to save you from yourself.”
Anger flashed up through her so violently that she was obliged to put her free hand against his shoulder simply to keep from losing balance. The cloth there was warm from him. Hard muscle shifted under her palm.
“You imagine a great deal! After weeks of being forced together, you hardly know me at all.”
Her wrist was captured against his chest now, and she could feel the thumping of his heart at the backs of her fingers.
“Do I not? I know how your breathing changes when you are lying. I know how you lean into me in a crowd and deny it the next instant. I know when you are angry and when you are frightened. I know how you watch my mouth when you mean to quarrel harder, not because you are right but because you cannot bear to be wrong. And I know that if I let go of your wrist now, you will not step back.”
Her heart gave one great, hard blow. “You are the most provoking man in Europe.” “Quite possibly.”
“And if I hated you a little less, I might kill you.”
“If you hated me more, you might match my sentiments.”
She shoved at his shoulder. He caught that hand, too. Now he had both. She should have twisted them, pulled free. Instead, she stood before him, breathing wine into the narrow space between them and glaring up into his face as if fury could still do the work distance had failed to manage.
“Let me go.”
“If I thought you meant to leave, I would.”
The pulse in her wrists hammered helplessly under his fingers.
“Well?” His gaze dropped to her mouth once more. “Are you going, or shall I keep arguing with you by whatever means I may?”
She rose on the last of her temper and kissed him.